With tourists coming in plane loads to experience the Hafa Adai Spirit, officials from the Guam International Airport Authority shared the latest issues they’ve been experiencing and how they're being addressed.

It’s a familiar experience for anyone who’s landed at any airport in the world. Arrival wait time at the airport and it’s something GIAA is trying to address. Deputy executive manager Dr. Ricky Hernandez told KUAM News, "We’re very aware of airport wait times, especially on arrival process. So it’s good to understand a couple things, as it relates to that. I know pre-pandemic, during our PM bank, when a lot more of the flights come in between the hours of 1pm to 4pm, when they leave.

"What we’ve seen before the pandemic, we had about 1,500 passengers come in at one time because we have all the airlines bringing the passengers in at that time. We were looking at an almost 40 minute average wait time, with a maximum of 83 minutes."

He added, "What we’re seeing now, with that same pm bank, with less flights, we’ve seen that average wait time be about 30 minutes and the max wait time is 52 minutes."

To try and lessen the wait time even more, GIAA put a new program into place.

"We did start the Airport Ambassador Program," Dr. Hernandez detailed. "Iit’s airport-funded, where we put multilingual staff, contracted out, in the arrivals-immigration area so that they could help people with filling out their forms, their required forms necessary to process through immigration."

"We do have about 80% of our foreign arrivals that come in that they arrive here on Guam Visa waiver and that requires a lot of manual paperwork and so, that’s what the ambassadors program is for and then of those foreign arrivals, 40% of them don’t come in with the form filled out. So we continue to work with our airline partners to see if we can try to get those forms filled out before they deplane and then also working with our regulatory partners and immigration to see how we can continue to augment our ambassadors because they’re there to help streamline, fill out forms, try to ensure that they’re going to the right area."

Hernandez added that as the flights into the island pick up, GIAA will also look to increase the ambassador program to help more of the Korean and Japanese tourists have an easier time getting through immigration and TSA.